Second Skin

by Michael Wiley

  When Tom Corfield invited me to a party at the house of one of the other teachers in the History department, I suggested dinner at my house instead. When, after eating, I showed him the patch I was putting on the bedroom wall, he looked longingly at the bed but said nothing. I touched my fingers to his, and the dry heat, thin and invisible as it was, seemed solid. He took my hand in his and said, ‘It’s been a long time.’

  ‘It has.’

  He tightened his hold. ‘What happens tomorrow?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I need to know.’

  ‘I can’t say. If that’s not enough for you—’

  He pulled me to him. For a night – before I turned him away – I clung to him, and the buffeting of my life with Johnny subsided.

  Then, one afternoon, Daniel called and said that the prosecutor was dropping the charges against Johnny. A man could shoot up a wall in his house if he wanted to, and the investigators had decided Johnny didn’t wish to hurt anyone when he shot through the door.

  As for the black creatures coming through the window, Daniel said he had checked with a state game warden and learned that Johnny suffered his breakdown in the middle of the legal hallucinatory-animal hunting season. When I said nothing to that, Daniel said, ‘A joke, Lillian. We still can joke.’

  ‘How’s the investigation into Sheneel and Alex Greene going?’

  ‘It’s going,’ he said.

  I fixed the house and patched up my life as best I could, wondering whether people who refuse to forgive each other are capable of mending and restoring themselves.

  At the beginning of the final week of Johnny’s hospitalization, they let me visit. His eyes looked medicated, and he’d lost weight and was pale, though he said the doctors were allowing him to walk outside along the riverfront path if he brought a nurse’s aide. We spoke nothing of forgiveness or repair.

  I went back to class, and though the syllabus said Melville, we returned to Walt Whitman’s ‘The Wound-Dresser.’ I read a line from the middle of the poem, then asked the students to read a line from anywhere they chose. I read, ‘The crush’d head I dress (poor crazed hand tear not the bandage away).’ A girl in the back, who had seldom said a word, spoke without raising her hand, ‘Their priceless blood reddens the grass.’ Another girl said, ‘I dress a wound in the side, deep, deep.’ A boy read, ‘From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand, I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood.’ Samuel Huang started before the other boy finished, ‘I am faithful, I do not give out.’ I started again as Samuel Huang finished, ‘But soon my fingers failed me, my face drooped and I resigned myself, to sit by the wounded and soothe them, or silently watch the dead.’ We sewed the pieces into a new poem, a patchwork and discordant thing.

  On a Saturday morning, I returned to the hospital, and Johnny and I walked out together. Johnny looked sluggish, as if he was pushing his legs through sleep. He climbed into the car on the passenger side, and I sat in the driver’s seat. His bag of meds lay on the floor at his feet. I’d listened as the doctor warned him about the danger of going med-free, and he’d acquiesced as if a central muscle in him had been cut.

  I started the car, then killed the engine. He stared through the windshield at the other parked cars. I took his hand. A nurse had cut off his cast the night before, and he wore a heavy fabric brace on his pale lower arm. His fingers were cold, but they gripped my hand as I gripped them. I asked, ‘Can we forgive each other?’

  He looked into my eyes as if he was uncertain what lay inside me. ‘No,’ he said quietly, but still he gripped my hand, as if forgiveness was the least of what we needed.

  I said, ‘Even though unforgiving, never ’gainst thee shall my heart rebel.’

  For a long time, Johnny seemed to think about the words before saying, ‘I like that.’

  ‘Byron wrote it to his wife after he forced her to do anal and she caught him sleeping with his sister.’

  Johnny laughed. I loved that laugh, even when it sounded like breaking glass.

  SIXTEEN

  Johnny

  The doctors injected me with God knows what, and when that only made the monsters grow, they strapped me down and injected me again until they exhausted the monsters and me both, and though the monsters never blew apart into shards of bone, blood, and sinew, they slowed their attack and then froze where they stood like taxidermied beasts collecting dust on a museum floor. I wondered if the medicine had turned me into a taxidermied man too, collecting dust in a hospital bed, and decided that it probably had. The doctors asked me how I had spent the night before shooting up my bedroom, but they seemed to doubt the stories I told them of my trip to a poisoned garden in the woods, my midnight feast, and my drugging and near-drowning in the hands of a Gullah root doctor, as if I’d hallucinated those events as I’d hallucinated the wet black creatures at the window.

  I told them about the jimson weed and they doubted that too. They said my blood tests showed tropane alkaloid, which is in jimson, but they also said cocaine is basically pure tropane and they suspected that, whatever else I’d gotten myself into on the night I’d disappeared, I’d dunked my head in a pile of snow. They prodded my body, ran me through dozens of mental health and acuity batteries, shined penlights into my eyes, and brought me little plastic cups with assortments of pills. When the jaws and claws of the monsters went away entirely, the doctors introduced me to a nurse’s aide named Gerald, who told me he moonlighted as a bouncer at a strip club by the airport, and the two of us took long walks on the riverbank path and watched seagulls make suicide dives into the brown river only to emerge alive with fingerlings in their beaks. When one of the birds spiraled like an out-of-control jetfighter and then pulled out above the water’s surface, Gerald laughed and said, ‘Don’t you wish you could do that?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘when I go down, I plan to go down for good.’

  He said something that surprised me. ‘You Icarus, then?’

  ‘Hardly.’

  Lillian came and left and came and left. She looked nervous. I wanted to tell her that I was all right and she was all right and we were all right, but the words wouldn’t come. So we sat together, staring at each other, smiling a little, as if we’d lit a fuse and nothing had exploded but we knew better than to reach into the hole for it just yet. One morning, after I swallowed my pills, I told her, ‘Some things are better left unsaid.’

  Lillian nodded. ‘I know.’

  The truth is I would have forgiven her, but forgiving her would have meant forgiving myself, and I couldn’t see an angle from which that would be possible. If, in the safety of a swaying ship hold, I had tagged and processed the bodies of men who had died fighting out in the world, nothing I did now or in the future could undo or change the facts of my existence.

  ‘You know what your problem is?’ Gerald asked on one of our walks. ‘You’ve got to lighten up. You can take your medicine, but it won’t do any good if you don’t lighten up.’

  ‘I’m light,’ I said. ‘If you don’t hold me down, I’ll float away on the breeze.’

  Gerald shook his head. ‘You’d fall like a stone.’

  When Lillian arrived to take me home, we went out to the car and sat and held hands, and she told me about Lord Byron having anal sex, and I laughed, and I wondered if Gerald might be right – I needed to lighten up.

  But two days later, after Lillian left the house to teach her classes and I was sitting in the sunroom with the newspaper, Percy lying at my feet, a headline on the front of the Metro section made me laugh again, and this time laughing made me feel the way Gerald had described me: like stone. The headline said, Police Close Fernandina Case.

  The article explained that the Sheriff’s Office was ending the investigation into Sheneel and Alex Greene’s deaths. The evidence, a spokesman said, pointed to a tragic if unusual double suicide. A forensic pathologist determined that Sheneel had died of an overdose, having swallowed a combination of four prescription an
d nonprescription drugs. After she died, the police said, Alex – for unclear reasons – had mutilated his sister. ‘We’ve never seen anything like it,’ said the spokesman, ‘but we’re working under the assumption that this was an act of grief.’ When the police confronted Alex with the inconsistencies in his account, the grief apparently turned to despondency. The pathologist said that he also died of an overdose, compounded by a head injury most likely sustained when he fell from his bed. Investigation into the source of the drugs would remain active. Additional counseling would be offered to Sheneel’s college classmates.

  I pictured the bedroom where I’d found Alex Greene. The box spring and mattress rested directly on the green oval carpet where his body was lying – much too close and soft to cause a head injury. I pictured his arm, broken sideways and backward. I pictured a huge man moving toward me in the dim light, swinging a baseball bat.

  I felt the fury rise inside me, and, after I’d spent six weeks in the hospital, fury scared me. Lighten up, I thought. Lighten the hell up. I breathed to ease the pressure. Lighten. Up. I went to the kitchen and shook a Xanax from the vial – a tiny gray bullet, little bigger than a BB.

  I waited for the drug to mushroom from my head and chest into my arms and legs, and then it did. The drug was a lie, but it was a livable lie. I pictured Papa Crowe driving me home from the ocean where he’d almost drowned me, heard him saying, I tell you one thing more. Your brother-in-law, Daniel Turner, he going to drop the investigation. But now I answered, Lighten up.

  The phone rang. I looked at Percy sleeping on the floor. The ringing phone meant nothing to him. He had the right attitude. The phone rang again. No one here, I thought. It rang twice more, and the answering machine picked up.

  Lillian’s voice spoke on to the recording. ‘Johnny?’ She sounded worried. She probably thought I’d run off again. I would have to remember to tell her that, with enough Xanax, I didn’t need to run off. I was already gone. ‘Johnny? Pick up the phone.’

  I found the phone in the kitchen. ‘Hey,’ I said.

  ‘Have you seen the newspaper?’ she said. ‘Tom Corfield just told me. The police are dropping the investigation. They’re saying—’

  ‘I saw,’ I said.

  ‘It’s bullshit.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘I don’t know. We’ve got to do something.’

  ‘You don’t want to do this to me,’ I said.

  When we hung up, I took a nap. But I woke two hours later feeling jittery and hyped. Not good. Another Xanax would bring me down. And another and another and another. I went to the bedroom, undressed, and took a shower, cranking the heat so it scalded my skin. When I dressed again and walked into the living room, Percy was standing by the front door. ‘You think so?’ I said.

  Fifteen minutes later, I pulled to a meter across from the Sheriff’s Office and left Percy in the car. Inside the building, I told the woman at the security desk I’d come to see Daniel Turner, and when she called, he told her to send me back.

  As I entered the Homicide Room, Daniel stepped from his cubicle with a big grin and said, ‘Glad to see you out, Johnny!’

  I said, ‘Alex Greene’s arm was broken. It looked like someone tried to rip it off.’

  Still grinning, he crossed the room, put a loving hand on my shoulder, and said, ‘Come on back.’ We went to his cubicle, and he said. ‘Now, what’s this about?’

  ‘You’re calling Alex Greene a suicide? And Sheneel too? His arm was bent behind his back—’

  He narrowed his eyes, as if trying to be patient. ‘The medical examiner said the break happened after he died.’

  ‘Fine. And who broke it?’

  ‘That’s a bit of a mystery, right?’ he said. ‘And with a little prodding from me, we’ve decided not to look into it.’

  ‘Why is that?’

  ‘As far as we can tell, only one person could have broken it.’

  ‘Who is that?’

  Daniel let his eyes rest on me.

  I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’

  ‘You were there,’ he said.

  ‘I didn’t touch him.’

  Daniel leaned back in his chair. ‘When the Phelps security man came into the house, you were lying on top of him. You said someone hit you with a bat, but the security man saw no one and no bat.’

  ‘I told the truth.’

  ‘After a fashion.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  Daniel sighed. ‘It means you’re unreliable, Johnny – at best, unreliable. A lot of guys here think worse of you than that. Why should anyone believe you?’

  ‘You know this is wrong, Daniel.’

  ‘I don’t know anything like that.’

  ‘Papa Crowe told me you would do this.’

  The grin spread across Daniel’s face again. ‘Who is “Papa Crowe”?’

  ‘He said the Phelpses own you.’

  Daniel whispered, suddenly angry, ‘Be careful what you say. Crazy man or not, you don’t start accusing me. I love my sister and I’m sorry for you, but never try that on me, you understand?’

  ‘I’m telling you what Papa Crowe said. He said you had protected them before.’

  ‘Who is “Papa Crowe”?’ he asked again.

  ‘Sheneel and Alex Greene’s uncle.’

  ‘And why would Sheneel and Alex Greene’s uncle know anything about me?’

  ‘He seems to know about a lot of things.’

  ‘I’m serious, Johnny. Take care of your head. Get healthy. I’ve done what I can to help you – more than you know. But if you try to bring me down to your kind of craziness, I’ll cut you off. You understand?’

  ‘I understand,’ I said.

  ‘It’s time for you to figure out what matters,’ he said.

  ‘Right.’ I started to leave, then said, ‘What kind of drugs did they overdose on?’

  He rubbed his cheek with the flat of his hand. ‘The case is closed.’

  ‘I understand,’ I said.

  When I got back to the car, Percy was sitting on the driver’s seat. I shoved him to the side and said, ‘I’m going to take you to bite someone. What do you think of that?’

  He turned once, lay down on the passenger seat, and closed his eyes.

  Thirty-five minutes later, I pulled into the yard outside Papa Crowe’s half-painted wooden house. The folding lawn chair on the front porch was empty, but Papa Crowe’s brown Chrysler was parked on the broken oyster shells and weeds next to the house.

  ‘C’mon, boy,’ I said, and Percy bounded from the car after me.

  From the porch, the inside of the house looked dark, but when I knocked on the screen door, slow footsteps approached, and before I could see Papa Crowe, I heard him laugh and say, ‘Look what the devil drag home.’ The door swung open and he said, ‘Come in, son, come in.’

  I stepped into the dim room, Percy behind me. On the unpainted walls, rows of wooden shelves held glass jars – mayonnaise jars, fruit jelly jars, old Coke bottles, mustard pots – stuffed with dried leaves and flowers. A glass-fronted cabinet held jugs of strange-colored syrups. The air smelled of cinnamon.

  ‘I should kill you,’ I said.

  ‘Truth is I probably have it coming. That’s some powerful jimson or your head is weaker than I guessed. But I make a mistake, I own it.’ Percy ran among the shelves sniffing at the jars, but the old man looked unworried.

  ‘A bad mistake,’ I said. ‘Why did you do it?’

  ‘Trying to help.’

  ‘Next time you want to help, let me suffer on my own, OK?’

  ‘Fair enough.’ He was having difficulty sounding contrite. ‘It good to see you on your feet, that what matters.’

  ‘A little unsteady.’

  ‘That natural. Now, why you come to see me if you ain’t going to kill me?’

  ‘To tell you that you were right. The Sheriff’s Office dropped the invest
igation.’

  He frowned and turned toward the kitchen. ‘They tell the family yesterday. No evidence of murder, they say. Sheneel try suicide before, so she try it again. Alex tell guilty lies to the police about Sheneel, so he must’ve killed himself too. Straight line of explanation, they say. When fruit fall from the tree, it fall straight down. Don’t look for gravity to throw it over the fence.’

  I followed him into the kitchen. He went to a half-size refrigerator and pulled out a pitcher. ‘Tea?’

  ‘I’ll never again put anything you give me in my mouth.’

  ‘Understood.’ He poured a glass for himself and took a long drink. ‘So now we got to bury two more Greenes in the woods.’

  ‘They say Sheneel and Alex both overdosed. I asked Daniel, but he wouldn’t show me the toxicology report.’

  ‘Oh, I seen that. They give us a copy from the coroner. I take care of Sheneel with Indian root, but the report don’t mention none of that. It say she got codeine, OxyContin, marijuana, and Rohypnol in her blood. That it.’

  ‘Rohypnol? The date-rape drug?’

  ‘Sure. They say they see it in other suicides. It make it easy. You already asleep when you stop breathing.’

  ‘What killed Alex?’

  ‘A baseball bat crack his head, I think, but they say it is codeine and alcohol.’

  ‘I saw no bottles. I don’t think he was drinking.’

  ‘This what they say is all.’

  Then, from in front of the house, a car horn blew, once long and once short. Percy barked and jumped against the screen door.

  Papa Crowe set his tea on the table and said, ‘You wait here, son.’

  But I followed him into the living room, where he took a mustard pot from a shelf, and I watched through the front door as he approached a long black town car that had pulled sideways to the porch. The backseat window rolled down and a strange-looking woman peered out. She had high cheekbones and her white skin looked glassy, as if it had melted under high heat. She had no eyebrows, one of her eyelids seemed to hang crooked over her eye, and she’d drawn her thin black hair back tight the way you cinch a string to hold together a splitting bundle. She looked freakishly ancient, though she could have been young. She spoke to Papa Crowe out of one side of her damaged lips.